The poem di Prima by Ana Elsner was published in Ambush Review, Premiere Issue, 2010

INCUBATION

A prose poem by Ana Elsner:

And isn't it made seductively easy for us to overlook these clusters of embedded larvae, voracious maggots, laid in the moist corners and dark crevasses of our ignorance? How madly our heads were set spinning by the pollsters and the carnival whores, bewitching us with shameless spectacle and boisterous campaign, while entrapping us with the viral confetti of tinsel clad and laminated lies. Remember, this invasive blight of systemic depredation took hold with little or no resistance, and began gestating in the body politic well before the lobbying and the song and dance, when we were festooned with the dankness of our sweat, with the yellow ribbons of our fear, with the ravishing and chronic blindness to an un-masked reality, which had been coming on, which was going on, which is ongoing. Face it, these implanted pupae of calamity, hosted by the soft tissue of our minds, they await awakening, excubation in unison, sly maturation into a clandestine army, that is self deployed to game out the thin membrane of our fortitude, to deconstruct intelligent compassion, to eulogize our innocence, and inject a powerful anti-coagulant so our seeping wounds can never heal.

Ana Elsner's prose poem INCUBATION was first published in Poetry Salzburg Review, PSR 17, Salzburg, Austria. Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editor, Dr. Wolfgang Görtschacher.